A Writer's Diary

Cynthia Harrison

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You Can’t Hurry Love

Mar 12, 2010 5:22am

Down to the last 20 pages on the WIP. But not really. Because I still need 4000 words. However, the good news is I figured out a few days ago that I had rushed the end of my story. I will have no problem getting the word count when I...

Fishwife

Mar 11, 2010 4:40am

Last night, I was not in a great mood. I had spent the day grading essays, and, with a few exceptions, they were not good. It always makes me feel bad to give low grades. So having to do that set me up for the meltdown to come. I have been forcing myself to make...

Mental

Mar 9, 2010 4:11am

Two of the profs I share an office with on Monday and Wednesday are also writers. One’s a young poet with a first book almost completed and the other’s maybe about my age. She’s writing a novel, too. We were talking the other day about why we would do such a...

Word Count Crazy

Mar 6, 2010 6:26am

Harlequin’s category romances have specific word lengths, different for each category. They like writers to adhere pretty much to those standards. And they count actual words, not 250 times number of ms. pages like some other publishers. The series I’m targeting wants 55,000 words. I have 50,000 as of this morning. What...

Patience

Mar 4, 2010 4:40am

Being an Aries, I am not a patient person. I like things done yesterday. For example, the WIP. But life has a way of slowing the impatient down, even when we really want to speed up. I can only hope the universe knows what it’s doing. After all, I am not getting any younger… Two things slowed...

Monster Lit

Mar 2, 2010 4:52am

One of the courses I’m teaching this term is British Literature. Right now we’re with the Victorians. The Norton Anthology doesn’t have Dickens’ novels, so I’m out of luck there, but I knew I needed to teach Darwin and reading him made me think about the end of century outpouring of gothic horror...

Pages & Pages

Feb 28, 2010 7:06am

This weekend, I wrote 25 pages of longhand, pretty much finishing off the book, I hope. Now it’s just the typing that remains. Wish I had a secretary…...

Ready to Roll

Feb 26, 2010 6:39am

Read through my WIP this morning again and figured a few things out. And it’s only 9:30! Of course I woke up at 3 a.m. and what else are you gonna do at that time?? As I suspected, I’m not going to be adding 7000 words by filling in little scene...

Opportunity Knocks

Feb 25, 2010 4:28am

According to my horoscope, this Saturday will be my luckiest day of the year. I can’t imagine how. I have a ton of schoolwork–tests and papers to grade, lectures to organize. Al will be away visiting his folks. So I’ll be home alone, buried in work. How is this lucky? In a...

Writing in the Now

Feb 23, 2010 5:43am

300 words today. But they were good words, necessary words. My critique group this weekend helped me see where I need to expand on scenes already written. They couldn’t get a picture of my hero. I had so much dialogue but very little description of how my heroine sees him....