the conversation (dallas)

photo by howard vancleave

this past weekend i got to go dallas to meet 100 other people who want to find ways to positively impact the world in their businesses. there were a lot of writers, mostly non-fiction, socially conscious companies like roma boots, feed the children, and all around entrepreneurs.

i got there friday morning, not really knowing who would be there, not really knowing anything at all actually. but that was the beauty of it.

tammy kling, bestselling author and ghostwriter...you need to look her up. but in the mean time, let me tell you about her heart. generous is an understatement. she let a few of us stay at her lovely home this weekend, and man, can she pick some amazing people. i roomed with a beautiful soul from las vegas named j.c., and after two days of mini-adventures, i cannot wait to see her again. and that's just one of the people! oh, and her family, her husband and two sons...you honestly have never met better people.

my housemates and tammy

the best thing about that night was that everyone had something to say. everyone had a story to tell when we discussed the four topics around the fire: wisdom, impact, blindspots, legacy.

most of the time when you want to "talk" about something, especially for a lengthy period of time with strangers...people clam up or shut down. they don't want to open up to a group of people who might judge them or worse, approach them. they want to stay hidden with their junk, stay quiet with their thoughts.

but these folks were generous with their lessons, their faults, their issues, and their rebounds. they were up front about what didn't work and what did and what finally got them to realize it. it was magical.

nothing came from the conversations, nothing tangible at least. and that's what the world thinks of when it thinks of a takeaway, right? but, conversations like those will last and last, connections will be made, one little nugget that one person said will pop into someone else's head at some point in time...and oh, yeah, i met someone i can talk to about that. i met someone who knows all about that. i met someone who has connections there. the possibilities are endless and lasting. they are tangible, just not in the conventional way.

you haven't heard about this event before, i know. i hadn't either because it wasn't publicized. i doubt it ever will be advertised. because that was the nature of it. the anti-conference. but no less impactful.

here are some more pictures from the event :) i love my new friends! (most of these photos were taken by howard vancleave)

pre-conversations 

lisa prosen caught me deep in thoughts...yes, it's blurry

sharon lynch...lovely woman

some of the group

tammy kling :)

signing in

finally meeting blair...and check out my braid...did it on the fly...pretty psyched it looked so tidy.

caught changing into my mountain boots :) 

man, do i look like i have an attitude problem. 

lisa prosen :) 

my roomie, j.c.

kevin weaver and i talking about something, who knows!

you can't really see him, but that's tammy's amazing husband :) 

luke

sweet reed

headed to our first conversation

while we chatted about, you guessed it, blind spots

audio

ready to get going!

i know i've been m.i.a. from the blog until last week. i know, and i'm sorry.  but you know one of the reasons why: i've been typing 300+ pages into my computer for broken pieces.

another reason is that i've been recording an audio book for falling stars. 

i hadn't really thought about doing it until i started getting the question: is there an audio book? more and more. and even then, i had never actually listened to one myself, so what you don't know...is scarrrrry...or at least undiscovered territory.

so i called my mentor tammy kling, asked her opinion. called my dad, asked for the keys to the sound kingdom (really his home studio), and went straight to the library. all in one day. i checked out like five books on tape–ones i already had read in print. 

my plan was to listen to all of them in parts, learn the differences, find out my options. 

i checked out the following audiobooks: 

1. safe haven by nicholas sparks

2. saving grace by jane green

3. where'd you go bernadette by maria simple

4. the good girl by mary kubica

5. the husband's secret by liane moriarty

this is where people usually start to think i'm either crazy or thorough. i choose thorough:) 

oh, but first, i realized when i got home that i no longer had a cd player. we switched to computers without the cd drives in them for longevity of the hardware, and...and i'd checked out five audio book cds. luckily, my cute neighbors used cd alarm clocks (and they hadn't started back at school), so i was in business. 

you can see the pictures of my methods. i wrote down the intros, the narrator (jane green did her own but everyone else hired out)  and the voices used (were there multiple for each character or just one throughout), how long each track was, was there intro music, how many tracks per cd, how many cds in case i ever got to that point of wanting it to be on some. 

basically, you get the gist. i went to town. 

i loved all five of these books, so i know the writing was on point. but i will say, as a sort of mini review, not all audio books are the same. i won't go through all of them, but i'll point out a few things i  took from them.

i loved jane green's. she's the author, and she's friggin' british, so she knows what she's after. she knows exactly what it's supposed to sound like. 

i loved where'd you go bernadette. if you've read it, you know it could have been very tricky to pull off, not to mention a very funny manuscript...so the orders were tall, and they were fantastic. if you want a funny audio book, this is your pick. 

then, the husband's secret. this was very good. the hired australian voice actor was a perfect choice. she clearly understood the the story, and i was in love with the characters even more the second go round. 

after listening to all of them and comparing notes, i decided that narrating myself was not going to sound weird. in fact, it might be the only way.

the set up for a book is a tad bit different than music! massive iPad? check!  

charlie normally can sit with me the whole time when i record music. but since this is just reading, i found out how loud his snoring was. he had to take that outside the booth. ;) 

so, next it was the studio. i took a week when my family went on a trip to start recording. i literally showed up to their empty house with charlie, made coffee, booted up the studio (which is so much better with my dad in it) and talked to myself for hours. 

reading your words is great. it should be easier, right? well, it might have been, but i realized something: unlike learning a song to record, you never learn a book. not word-for-word.

you literally have to sit there and read a sentence in the right vocal tone (lilah, jobeth, jake, mom, dad, little summer) and simultaneously look ahead to what's next. your brain fries at twice the speed. and there were so many times when i found myself speaking as the mom in a rapid-fire dialogue, only to find out that it was the dad by the time i got to the end of the long sentence. on the tape, there are soo many times i sigh with frustration :) or say a clipped "no" or "start over" to myself. 

now i am at the editing process (which i love), but i had to leave town to come out to california for a week. editing shan't take as long, however. so stay tuned! 

right before i finished recording the last chapter

editing begins now!

command “p”

i hate typing. not like in general, typing this is fine. emails are too. but typing in a manuscript is the worst. 

“hire someone” i’ve been told a gazillionous times. “no” i say. as much as i want to say “yes” , i cannot hire someone to type my words in. that poor soul would be so confused. 

i take pictures of this every time

i write my manuscripts long-hand, not unlike some of my favorite authors (kristin hannah, elin hilderbrand). they write on legal pads and the like. i write in spirals or in sketchbooks, depending on how i feel. i listened to kristin hannah talk about how her assistant would type hers in…and i salivated. gross, but true. that’s how much i hate the typing part. 

but. when i write longhand, i try not to stop myself from trying anything. when you’re wielding a pen and not a keyboard with the delete button, you tend to go off script a little, try things and learn to live with them, at least till the next edit. it’s good for the story, which is all this whole thing is about, right? but the less than yay part of that magic is when you go too far off course. 

longhand in the dining room

longhand in the living room

if an avid typer took my manuscript, she would find it’s all over the place, that i’ve forgotten my character’s friend’s name halfway through and either left a blank or made up a new name. she would find that some characters don’t really know who they are yet, and they are all over the place. she would find lulls everywhere and type them anyway, wishing she’d never taken the gig to type for me. it wouldn’t bee good because i would just sit there and worry about it the whole time she did her job. it’s hard enough with a copy editor, and you know by then what’s in those 300+ pages! i edit as a type, which makes it even longer and more tedious and my hands start crapping out on me like they’re out of shape and just want some pringles while they sit on the couch and watch dancing with the stars.

right when i'd  just started typing it in! 

all this is to say that I JUST FINISHED TYPING IN THE MANUSCRIPT TO BROKEN PIECES. yes i did, yes i did. 

it took me weeks to do it because i basically found anything and everything to do first. that was until i realized i had to get it done before we left for a trip to santa monica. printing 300 pages outside of your own home just feels weird.

i looked up halfway through and gasped at the amount of words

and there’s something exhilarating about pressing “command p” in your office, at your printer. at least for me there is. so i got to do that yesterday, and i’m pretty friggin’ pumped. 

typing in florida

why am i going to santa monica? find out soon! 

master class with james patterson

on my facebook feed one day, a useful advertisement popped up...it was one of the better ones that i've seen. james patterson was doing a MASTER CLASS (aka an online series of classes). i don't write like mr. patterson nor write about the subjects he does, but he is one of those authors you just want to study. he has a pacing that is insane. he keeps you guessing and literally turning the page for just one, ok two, ok twenty more chapters.

i read any memoir/how-to book on the craft of writing...i think i've suggested stephen king in another post. his book on writing was so good, and i (i'll admit) had only read one of his books before. i've also read (and suggested) anne lamott's book bird by bird as well as janet evonovich's how i write.  the books are just fascinating. to see how they stumbled on their brilliant careers or whether they'd been pushing for it for decades. to read about their methods. to read about the blocks they ran into both professionally and personally. to read about them for once.

<<<SIDE BAR that's what is so cool to me about writing as opposed to being a recording artist. i used to be marketing myself as the product, my look and my voice and my music, so i had to be verrrrry aware of who i was putting out there in terms of "me". funny thing was that i lost "me" in trying to find that.

but with writing, it's not about that at all. it's not about me. it's about characters and their lives. i'm on the back burner, and it feels quite splendid, actually. so, with that said, readers rarely get a window into an author's soul. or at least they don't know if this character is a manifestation of the author or that one, or maybe that one. basically, it's rare to know the man/woman behind the curtain. SIDE BAR COMPLETE>>>

james patterson doesn't have a memoir or a how-to on himself or his writing, at least none that i've found.but MASTER CLASS was even better!

there is a series of videos, printable workbook thingy, and what they call "office hours", where mr. p will go through a few submissions and critique bits and pieces that go along with the chapter's subject matter. it's all great stuff, even if you know your ways or methods. just to get that vote of confidence for "how you've always done it" helps an amateur like me feel a little bit better about my natural instincts as a writer.

the best part though? hands-down: the outline.

i've written posts about outlines, about how i usually don't do them, about how i had to for this sequel to keep some of the timeline and facts straight, and blah blah blah. so i was most interested to see what made this bestselling author x a million swear by the outline.

inside the packet, he included a never-before-read (even by his publisher) outline of one of his books honeymoon. i happened to have already purchased a copy, so i read the finished book before starting this section. this was the golden part of the class, and mostly done on my own.

having read the book, i knew what it ended up being. and when i read the nine-or-so page outline, i figured it would be pretty much the same, minus some dialogue. let me back up and say that james patterson outlines like i think: in paragraph form. for some reason (probably every english course i've ever had), i thought all outlines had to be formatted with bullet points, short, short, to the point. but he doesn't do that, and i am pretty sure it just made me want to outline my next book. i don't know why, but i adhere to rules that don't exist a lot. like bullet points vs. paragraphs. they always seemed inherently wrong, so i simply opted not to outline because i was incapable of making a "proper" outline.

i mean, i used to write my papers first and then outline them after when we had to turn them in. that's how weird i was about it. bullet points neuter my creativity. how am i supposed to boil it down until i have discovered it on my own!? so this...it was pure freedom. (and my husband thinks i'm crazy for feeling this much freedom, so it's ok if you do, too)

back to j.p.'s outline of honeymoon. i read the first chapter...pretty darn close. the second, yep. the third, yeah, minus a few details...and so on until i saw my first question mark on the paper. if you haven't read the book or taken the class and you plan to, i won't talk about it in depth and spoil the fun. in vague terms, the outline was very far away from the actual published work. there were major pieces  left out of the outline, characters introduced a hundred pages sooner in the final that were not woven in so strategically in the outline. chapters were split into more, whole chapters were missing or stricken from the final to build more suspense.

being a nervous and novice outliner, it was a magnificent sight. james patterson isn't some mastermind who thinks ahead of the pen, writing books in his head and knowing all the tricks and twists right from the start. his first outlines are great, but they are regular. and they start the creative ball rolling, like they are supposed to.

i am buzzing over here with excitement. i don't know if i'll always outline from now on, simply because i like to take every manuscript as a new case. also, i don't write suspense or true crime with the amount of chapters he has or the case-solving aha's he reveals every few pages. my books are more off the cuff a lot of the times, less planned out. however, by taking the class, i discovered another tool for the writer's toolbox, and you can never have too many of those suckers.

i learned i could write an outline the way i wanted to. and while maybe i should have known that, i didn't. middle school english still has a strong hold on me, clearly. but i'm growing, i'm growing!

my final thought: if you are a writer, this is a good class to take. you can take it on your own time, write tons of notes like i am or just listen. it is all good. all worthy of your time as a writer.

*this is not a paid endorsement. i am just that geeky.