Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 2 of 12)

A One Year Streak

September 16, 2024 /

I wrote earlier in the year about how 2023 was a lean year for writing. What I didn’t add at the time was one of the activities I put in place to improve my word count.

I’d been reading Julia Cameron’s book Write For Life, and as she does in all her books, she advocated Morning Pages. I tried Morning Pages several years ago, struggled with writing three of 8.5 x 11 pages in a timely manner every day, and let it drop.

Last September, I was ready to try anything to get back into a regular writing rhythm, so I sat down and set a goal of three pages within thirty to forty-five minutes. It has now been a full year, and I haven’t missed a day. There have been days where I only managed one page, usually because of a time crunch, and occasionally because instead of letting go and just writing, I tried to force words onto the page.

Most days, I stay within the time limits I set myself. Some days, I find myself looking blankly at the page, and not quite sure where the thought or idea was going? I don’t think that’s a symptom of age as I’ve always been a bit like that.

Has it helped my actual writing? I have to say an unqualified yes. I blew past the 2023 word count in early June, and found Pages a useful place to work out questions or issues I have with a story. It’s not outlining, more a discussion with myself about what I want to happen next. This might be a page or more of discovery, or a dozen bullet points on ordering events across the next three or four chapters. Sometimes what goes into the actual story is close to those musings. Other times, they trigger something and I’m off in a different direction. Either way the process has helped my writing.

Julia Cameron recommends a weekly review and the first question is “how many days did you do Morning Pages this week?” There’s an implied expectation that at some point you will miss a day of Morning Pages. Last September I expected a miss to happen. So far it hasn’t and I hope to say the same this time next year when Morning Pages has become a two-year streak.

Rethinking Plans

September 10, 2024 /

This week was supposed to be a vacation week, and in some ways it still is.
I had planned maintenance work around the house and two or three rounds of golf. Or maybe only one if I play as badly as I have done the past few times I’ve been out.
All that changed over the weekend. It has been wet and miserable here, and everything was damp. And, as I learned to my cost while walking the dog, slippery.
My right foot skidded on a curb. My left ankle rolled and there I was lying on the ground with the dog looking at me, and wondering why I was down at her level.
The ankle hurt, and swelled up nicely, and a day later, still swollen but with some beautiful colored bruising, I was at the Urgent Care for an examination and x-rays. I left with a support boot, a referral to the orthopedic doctor, and a suspected broken bone.
Over the last two or three days, it hasn’t felt broken, but any walking without the boot quickly becomes uncomfortable.
Hence the rethinking of plans.
There’ll be no golf this week, but I should get to some of the small maintenance items I’ve been avoiding for a while. I think I’d have preferred the golf!

Thrill Ride 7 is nearly here

September 3, 2024 /

Make a wildfire your ally. Tread softly with the French Resistance during WWII. Extract an informant from the dangers of the Babylonian streets. Sail the Atlantic, float down a river, or take a fishing boat far out to sea. And you can always fight the Phoenicians with the least lucky Viking ever born.

My short story Making the Way Home is included in this issue of Thrill Ride Magazine.

Thrill Ride 7 arrives on September 21. You can preorder your copy on amazon at:amazon.com/gp/product/B0CWCPJZM5

Keeping a Streak Simple

August 26, 2024 /

Some years ago, I stopped using electronic apps for tracking tasks, to-dos and appointments, and went back to a manual organizer based on Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method. None of my pages are as colorful or attractive as the examples in his book, and until this week, I never really understood the concept of collections.

The lightbulb moment came when I was looking at how best to record a new daily activity which requires noting a specific item and then some reflection notes on that item. In some ways it would be easier to track this with an app, and I nearly went that route. That was until I remembered my schedule over the next few months won’t always have me near a computer or tablet.

So it was back to some internet searches and Ryder Carroll’s book and some thinking about what I wanted to get from this activity. The one thing I didn’t want was a big overhead. No matter how enthusiastic I am at the beginning, if it takes a lot to set up the documentation, I lose interest really quickly and the activity goes into that heap of other activities I’ve started and allowed to drift away.

In the end it was simpler than I expected. I have a two-page spread for each month, and decided to note the item against the day of the month. Beside the item, I make a reference to the page where I wrote the notes and reflections so I’m not constrained for space on the notes.

So far the streak is just starting. I’ll report back next August if it’s still going.

Some Thoughts on History

August 19, 2024 /

Sometime in the middle of July, I started the book Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz. I bought the book because it looked to be about the Marine General Smedley Butler, and his experiences leading up to the time he was invited to join a proposed coup against then president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I had two reasons for picking up the book. First was to learn more about Butler, and his apparent involvement with the coup. Second was to get a deeper understanding of the series of small actions in the Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century referred to as the Banana Wars. I knew a little about the Banana Wars from a visit to the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico some years ago, but outside of the documentation in the Marine Corps Archives, I hadn’t found out much about the Banana Wars, or the planned coup.

In the back of my mind was a novel, or series of novels about Marines in the Banana Wars with a central character present in all the books. I fully admit the idea for this came from my reading of W. E. B. Griffin’s series The Corps and his main character Ken McCoy. I even wrote an opening chapter about the 4th Marine Regiment deploying to Dominica from New Orleans.

Katz’s book jumps from relating one part of Smedley Butler’s service to that same area today – the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti etc. – and documenting the failings and excesses of the US as an Imperial power.

I haven’t yet read enough beyond Gangsters of Capitalism to form a proper opinion on Katz’s view of the history he tells. However, there was enough there for me to pause and think about the Banana Wars series. If I write the stories without reference to the excesses that took place, and which were apparently condoned all the way to the White House regardless of its occupant, I’m painting a false picture of the times. A picture that’s likely unjust to everyone involved.

Dean Wesley Smith reminds me regularly that writer’s are, at heart, entertainers. Staying anywhere close to reality means these stories wouldn’t be entertainment. So, for the moment, the Banana Wars idea is on indefinite hold.

Sprinkles not Spoonfuls

August 5, 2024 /

This past weekend I received some feedback on The Corpse in the Courtyard from one of my first readers.

I found the prolog hard, she said. There were time when you used a comma and I expected the word and after it. Did you do that deliberately?

As an example, I wrote A part of Jacob wanted to relax, walk across the courtyard The expectation was relax, and walk.

Writing that way was a deliberate choice. I came across the technique while studying the Eve Dallas novels by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts). I liked what she did and how she did it, and decided to experiment with the technique about the time I started writing The Corpse in the Courtyard.

Dean Wesley Smith describes using many craft techniques – tags, power words, etc., as sprinkling a spice in your writing. It adds depth and flavor when done right. If you do it wrong, it can pull the reader right out of the story – just like that mouthful of cayenne pepper when you used a tablespoon instead of a pinch.

So I went back to the Eve Dallas books, and then my manuscript.

Essentially that’s what I did in the prolog. Instead of sprinkling the technique through the pages as J.D Robb did, I spooned it on thickly in just about every other paragraph. Because I was now reading the story from a different perspective, I saw what I’d done and felt how clunky the story flowed. Not good as I could lose a reader in the first four or five pages, and they would never know why they didn’t feel at home with the story.

It didn’t take long to make some changes that improved the flow of the opening. Now I have to read through my current work-in-progress and make sure I used sprinkles and not spoonfuls.

A Licensing Wrinkle

July 22, 2024 /

Over this past weekend, I was browsing the DepositPhotos web site looking for images I can license for book covers. I have a couple of projects currently in their early stages, but I have a fairly clear vision of how I want the covers to look to fit into that genre.

One of those visions is to have a New York image as a background with the characters in the foreground.

Easy enough you’d think, except there are several hundred thousand images of New York on DepositPhotos. They range from instantly recognizable landmarks like Central Park or the Empire State Building to street and alleyway scenes you’d only recognize if you lived close by.

I’m getting better and refining the searches and quite quickly found an image I liked that fit what I was looking for. When I clicked on the image for more details, it came up, and there was a white callout box above the image that said Editorial Use Only. Interesting, I thought. What does that mean? Fortunately, there was a pop-up box along with the callout to explain Editorial Use Only.

Essentially these images can only be used for non-commercial purposes and their use in any published work that involves the payment or receipt of a fee is prohibited.

Bummer, but as I said with several hundred thousand images it just took another few minutes to find something I could use without the Editorial Use Only restriction. The cover mockup looked good as well.

Before finishing a quick recap on Pro-Writing Aid Everywhere. I am getting to better grips with it. There are still some areas that feel a little clunky, but overall it has removed a step from my editing workflow.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

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