Shame on Us No More. Own Who You Are, Baby.

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Shame on Us No More. Own Who You Are, Baby.
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I cannot tell you how much fear of public shaming and disdain has held me back my entire life. I’ve pretty much smalled myself down because I was so nervous about random, anonymous (or not) mean things happening. And I talk about that more specifically in the podcast.

Teddy Roosevelt has this quote from a speech in Paris in 1910 just after he ran for president. There were over 2,000 people there.  “Citizenship in a Republic,” or “The Man in the Arena.”

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

TR

The applause lasted more than two minutes. Multiple times.

“The first time I read this quote,” Dr. Brené  Brown wrote in the intro to her book Daring Greatly, “I thought, This is vulnerability. Everything I’ve learned from over a decade of research on vulnerability has taught me this exact lesson. Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

So here goes:

Ignore the noise.

Blow off the haters.

Do your work.

Follow your passion.

Love your people.

Power through or love your way through your insecurities.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

We talk about feet sort of, but really facilitated meeting ice breakers. Either one? Totally sexy.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Sparty doesn’t care if people call him a toothless weirdo. He just loves every moment. Be like Sparty.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Strange Things You Didn’t Expect As An Adult

Loving the Strange
Loving the Strange
Strange Things You Didn't Expect As An Adult
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Yeah, we were supposed to talk about being a grown-up, and we sort of did? But we’re a live podcast and sometimes things go wild and really off topic because we aren’t scripted and we interact with listeners. So, yeah, that happened.

We also made a ton of shameless plugs for Stubhy. Why? Because he is brilliant and talented and kind and that’s a pretty power combination.

https://youtube.com/live/2ILmaxQfaVk?feature=share

LINKS WE TALK ABOUT

SHOUT OUT

The snippet of our intro and outro music is only a snippet of this guy’s awesome talent. Many thanks to Kaustubh Pandav. You can check out a bit of his work at the links below.

www.luckyboysconfusion.Net or www.Facebook.com/mrmsandtheinfusions 

Thanks for hanging out with us! And remember, don’t be afraid to let your strange out.

The Power of Silence In Writing

And how to put it on the page

Sound.

It often surrounds us.

But sometimes it is just completely and utterly gone.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a moment of high trauma (personal or public). It’s the moment when something big happens, something so big that time feels like it slows down or stops completely. Your brain switches into another gear and you’re straining looking for clues, trying to figure out where the danger is coming from, what it is, and how to survive it. I’ve had people describe these moments when they’ve had a gun pointed at them in the parking lot of a motel, when a man has raised a fist in a dining room, when they’ve realized a loved one having a heart attack in their aunt’s living room, when they were at recess in fourth grade and a bully was heading over to give them a wedgie.

For me, one of the times I experienced this was at the Boston Marathon when the bombs went off, and I was trying to understand what was going on. Even though I was on my cell phone, the world whooshed out for a moment. My personal world was silent even in the chaos. Then the sounds of cops on radios and the cacophony of panicked voices and runners feet hard against the asphalt streets rushed back in.

As writers, we explain these moments and try to encapsulate them and sometimes? Well, sometimes we try too hard and write and write and write giant redundant paragraphs that instead of immersing our readers in the silence and shock and stress or a moment and instead overwhelm with noise.

Here’s the thing: There is a great power in silence in our world and on the page.

Silence appears on the page in a couple of places.

  • It’s in the white space. The white space is just the places on the page where there are no words.
  • It’s in the words you actually choose and how you structure them.

What do I mean by that? When we choose words on the page, those words make associations in our minds and in the readers. So, we want to pick the words sometimes that play into the silence sometimes. This is a really great device for scenes of heightened emotion and suspense.

For word choice, she cackled isn’t the same as she laughed.  Those are loud things though. For a more silent experience, she whispered isn’t the same as she said.

And for structure? You have a lot to play with.

Here is a quick example.

Original:

I heard the dog growl and then I heard a scream and wondered what might be happening, what might have caused that growl and scream.

Too much writing there, right? A lot of padding. A lot of distancing words (heard, wondered) that lessen the impact and the immediacy of the moment. Here it is with a bit more silence.

After:

The dog growled. And then, someone’s scream shattered the air. Who was that? No. What was that?  

Add in white space to make it more tense:

The dog growled.

And then, someone’s scream shattered the air.

Who was that?

No.

What was that?  

Add in specifics to make it even more tense:

Hackles raised, the dog growled by the mailbox, which leaned toward the darkness of the Mud Creek Road.

And then, a shrill, cackling scream shattered the humid air.

Who was that?

No.

What was that?  

You can see all the differences in there, right?

Like any tool, you don’t want to overuse it, but you want to know about it, know that it’s there (just like you’d like to know if there was a mass of zombie gerbils trundling down the street toward your home). Sound and silence are really important tools on the page. Just like a guitarist wants to know about an entire string on her instrument and a pick and what happens to sound when you use a bridge or what happens when you tap out a beat on the guitar’s side, you want to know about all the tools you can use as a writer. 

Silence is a tool, and it’s an important one. Sound is too.

How Do You Fill the Void? And My Dog Doesn’t Love Me.

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
How Do You Fill the Void? And My Dog Doesn't Love Me.
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There are so many times that we’re driven to succeed, to attain goals and hit milestones and then we think–ah, life is awesome.

Or do we?

It’s really about not being stagnant when you want to be a better version of yourselves. You seek out ways to become better. You look for information.

So, how do we fill that void.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Apparently, according to Shaun, Sparty doesn’t love me, Carrie

Sparty: Don’t let him play you like that, baby.

RANDOM THOUGHT LINK

https://apnews.com/hub/oddities

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Naughty License Plates and How To Sleep Like a Boss

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Naughty License Plates and How To Sleep Like a Boss
/

This week we delve into sleep and how to sleep like a boss and why you might want to, but it’s your life and your choice.

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

Have your routines. Mine is eat, poop, snuggle, find dark place, sleep.

You can learn from this.

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Links to Learn More

https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep/why-sleep-important

https://apnews.com/article/maine-vanity-license-plates-profanities-1149eb44063bb3608574b2f017e6cc99

Connect with Dr. Matt Walker

Strange Dreams

Loving the Strange
Loving the Strange
Strange Dreams
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Join us for a bit of a rollercoaster podcast (at least for Carrie) all about strange dreams, but mostly nightmares. It’s live. It’s real. It’s Loving the Strange

https://youtube.com/live/I0uUzD1ozKc

LINKS WE REFERENCE

https://www.healthline.com/health/sleep/common-nightmares-that-are-actually-warnings#dreaming

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleep-newzzz/202005/have-you-been-having-weird-dreams-lately-heres-why

Does Your Form Match Your Function?

Thoughts on Writing Action and a Little Bit on Pacing

So, I’ve been talking a bit about action scenes lately. And one of the big adages that writing coaches and writers put out there is that you want the form to match the function.

Chuck Wendig is a big advocate of this and he writes,

“Form and function do well together across all types of writing, but this is particularly true in terms of writing action. I find that when I write action, the form of my writing moves to match the pacing of the action. I tend to like my action sequences presented as a short, sharp shock, and so the writing tends to mirror that. Shorter sentences. Sentence fragments. Blunt, brutal language. Words like rabbit punches. Like the stitching of prison shivs.

“Is this necessary? No, probably not. But there’s value in setting the pace of your scene with the clip at which you write. You don’t want to write long, languid patches of prose in writing action. We want action to be fast, exciting, engaging, and most of all, easy-to-read. Writing action is in this way like writing dialogue: you want it to come across to the readers without them halting, without them pausing to take a breath.

“That’s not to say there’s no value in slowing things down — pacing is a tricky thing. The escalation of any story has its peaks and valleys and you can give an action sequence those same valleys, too — you can collapse moments just as easily as you can drag them out. The value in that is the value of crafting tension. By pausing before the money shot, the cookie-pop, the underwear-shellacking, you’re forcing the audience to hold their breath a little bit.”

One of the most important things he says here is this: It’s tricky. You want a balance of detail and feeling/senses. You want your reader to know what’s happening but also to feel what’s happening in the scene. Each gut punch should make them flinch and worry.


There is pacing that happens within a scene as well as within a chapter as well as within the entire structure of a book.

Fight and action scenes are no different. There are places within those action scenes where you might want to slow things down.

Why is that?

Well, it’s because your job as a writer is to focus the reader on a whole bunch of things, but the main ones are:

1.   What is happening in the scene?

2.   Why is it happening?

3.   What is the harm or help that this event is doing to your main character?

4.   What are the stakes: physical and emotional?

To get that balance, you have to pick and choose what you’re going to write.

If you write every single detail and every single movement, it allows the reader to truly see the scene, BUT it also makes a lot of readers fall asleep.

What? Fall asleep in an action scene? How is that even possible?

Well, it’s possible because there’s no:

1.   Sensation. We also want bits about how it feels to fall down hard on your bum or get punched by a hamster.

2.   Stakes. There’s no emotional resonance for the character.

3.   Character revelation: You want to show subtext in this action scene. You want it to have a reason.  You don’t want it to be just fighting for the sake of fighting but it isn’t building or dismantling their character or moving the plot forward.

You can look at the simple structure of your sentences and paragraphs and analyze them for pacing:

Think about how long the sentences are.

Think about where the periods are. Where are the commas.

How long is the paragraph? How many sentences are in that paragraph?

How much white space (places with no writing) is on the page?

Short sentences and paragraphs make your writing much more clear and more clean to the reader. But they are also great resonating moments for stories.

Jesus wept.

That’s a big deal moment right there. Two short words.

Think about how different the pacing of that is compared to:

Carrie started crying because she was a little overwhelmed by getting up at 5 a.m. consistently to get all her work done and because she basically has no love of mornings, not that she has a great love of nights either. Honestly, does the woman love anything other than manatees and if not, why does she live so far from manatee habitat. Maine seems like a bad life choice for a weeping, manatee-loving woman like Carrie.

How To Talk To Your Cat About Gun Safety And Other Ridiculous Books

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation
How To Talk To Your Cat About Gun Safety And Other Ridiculous Books
/

This week, we venture aware from the world of self-development and into the world on the weird because we honestly just need a break.

Hopefully, you’ll be along for the ride.

DOG TIP FOR LOVE

This week’s advice is via Sparty who says, “You know, if you love squirrels, it’s okay to love squirrels. Love who you love, man. Or, you know, just love the squirrel you’re with.”

LINKS TO LEARN MORE

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/truth-is-out-there-just-not-here-two-old-farts-offer-wisdom-georgia-park/Y3SSC5IW4BCGHDADMBQWK6KSCU/

https://alwaysjudgeabookbyitscover.com/

https://theuselessweb.com/

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. 

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song?  It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.

AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!

Be Brave Friday – Art is a Belief in Life

“To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore

That Moore quote blew my mind today.

That’s because for me, I always thought that I was afraid to paint or even try to paint because my sweet, well meaning mom told me when I was little that nobody in our family had an artistic bone in our bodies.

I was meant to make story with words, she said. She was right. But I really wanted to make story with image, too. We never had fancy markers. We never had fancy paint. So, I’d work the crayons all the way to the nubs. I’d completely demolish the eraser on the end of my number 2 pencil.

I only took one art class in high school because I was so focused on making sure that I looked “academically rigorous” enough to get into colleges, which worked.

But there was always this urge to paint.

I’ve always though that the reason that I couldn’t share my images was because I was too afraid of ridicule because “nobody in our family has an artistic bone in their body.”

Now, that I’ve seen that Moore quote I think there might be another layer in there that adds to that fear.

“To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore

One of the major criticisms that I get of my writing (news, blogs, books, poems, social media posts) is that I’m schmaltzy, that I have hope. I usually can brush that aside when it comes to writing because I believe in hope for communities and individuals. I believe that the drive to want to make things better is partially rooted in the hope that each of us can make a difference.

So, why can’t I allow my art to be hopeful too? To be seen? It’s decidedly bright. It’s decidedly full of aspiration. It’s hope.

Hope hasn’t been that cool since Obama, and even then not everyone was into it.

But here’s the thing: hope doesn’t mean an absence of understanding.

Hope doesn’t mean that you don’t acknowledge evil.

Hope doesn’t mean that you don’t see the need for change. It actually implies the need for change.

To believe in life. That’s a giant step of hope. To believe that we can make a difference, can understand, work together and alone to make brighter futures for us and everyone else despite everything?

That’s pretty damn powerful.

We have to believe in our hope, in life, in our own power to do good, don’t we? Because if we don’t? We shutter ourselves, our community. If we don’t, we choose hopelessness, the downward spiral.

I regret how cowardly I’ve been about so many aspects of my life. But I’m really hoping to fill myself with brightness and hope.

 Keith Haring said, “Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”

I want to go further. I hope you do, too.


So, here’s my painting for BE BRAVE FRIDAY

Totally not finished.

Totally flawed.

Totally still trying.

Totally me. 🙂

By me. 🙂

Don’t Make Your Readers Bad Swoon

Writing action scenes means picking details.

Readers, have you ever read an action scene and it made you feel dizzy?

You are not alone.

This happens when the writer wants to put every single detail of the scene inot the scene, on the page, and in your mind. This is a really kind want of a writer, but the thing is that it doesn’t really work.

Writers, I’m talking to you now. Take off your reader hat and just put on your writer hat while I tell you this: You do not want to make your readers swoony in a bad way.

When you tell us every single characters’ actions, thoughts, emotions, and placement in an action scene, it overwhelms us. So, what you want to do is pick and choose here.

You want to pick and choose:

1. The characters that have the most at stake emotionally and physically.

2. The characters that the reader is the most attached to.

The best way to deal with this is to usually try to stay super close to your protagonist during the action scene. Make sure that you are writing the scene from the viewpoint of that characters. If your puppy main character is watching a Star Wars style space battle, you want to make sure you tell it from that puppy’s point of view.

Our jobs as writers is to pick and choose the details that matter and then trust the reader to recreate that scene in their brains. We don’t want to distract them with the color of the puppy’s collar unless that matters.

If we do the opposite, if we show the reader every little action that happens, then we risk boring the hell out of them, but also we don’t give them to focus on.

Spoiler: You want them to focus on your protagonist and then maybe the antagonist. You want them to focus on the stakes, what your hero wants, and what’s standing in her way.

Think of it like this: You are a movie director. The page is your camera. You want to put the things in focus that matter.

Masterclass has this lovely tidbit.

via Masterclass

That’s all a direct quote. What I love about it is that it talks about the most important part.

You don’t want a sword fight in there just for the sake of a sword fight. That sword fight or the hamster zombie troop running down the street after you needs to be there for a purpose.

Once you have that purpose, pick the details.

I think I’ll probably talk more about this next time, too. I hope you’re doing well and safe. It’s snowing madly here right now. And poor Shaun’s just had his third cancer (in less than a year) scraped out of his hand. He’s had three types of skin cancer in one year. This is the kind of overachieving we don’t want. 🙂

our front porch. You can totally tell this isn’t staged because we still haven’t taken the cushions in for winter (Yes, it is March) and one is lopsided. 

I’m posting writing tips and things about how we’re trying to live better lives over here if you want to check it out. My regular website is here. No pressure though, obviously. Thanks for reading this! And happy writing. 

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