How was your homework from Writing Roundup #9? Were you able to re-focus your writing priorities this month? Have you improved with showing and telling? Were you able to finish The Elements of Style? Have you learned any cool new words?

This year will be full of exciting new things. I'm going to read some longer series and review them as single works; I can’t write those review posts quite as fast as I can for single books, so that means more Writing Roundup posts!  I'm increasing the frequency of these from every four weeks to every three weeks. You might have to hustle a little to get that homework done, especially this time. I’m sorry--blame the lemur.

Productivity:

Edit 2023: Unfortunately, the videos I shared for this post were taken down by their creator.

Writing-Craft

With the revised edition of The Emotion Thesaurus from Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi coming out on February 19th, there are a lot of recent writing blog posts about writing emotion. These are just a few of my favorites:

• Writers Helping Writers | How to Get Emotion Onto the Page by Lisa Cron
• Jane Friedman | The Inner Struggle: How to Show a Character’s Repressed Emotions by Angela Ackerman
• Fiction University | Do You Think He Likes Me? Conveying Emotions in Your Novel by Janice Hardy

Prompt

You can read my basically unedited attempt at this prompt on Wattpad. Placeholder words are in [square brackets] and notes to myself for later are in {curly brackets}.

If you would like me to see your attempt, send me a link, or share it on Twitter with the hashtag:

Technical Stuff

Today we begin Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty. You guys know I love the Grammar Girl podcast. This book has her top tips organized into a single handy guide. I love that it’s written in her voice—her phrasing and expression are basically the same as on the podcast, making this book friendly and accessible. Oh, and there are pictures!

Your assignment is to read the Introduction and Chapter 1: Dirty Words. This is a pretty long reading assignment (51 pages), so don’t wait until the last minute to read this one. I recommend reading it once and using some little sticky tabs to mark the words that trip you up the most. Then reread those sections you marked and practice using the words and phrases correctly.

Vocabulary

 If you want to use my words, I have a Memrise course for this class.

Since we’re moving to a 3-week schedule on these posts instead of 4, I’ve decreased my vocabulary list for this session from 28 words to 21 words, because one word/day is about as much as I can deal with without sacrificing something else more important in my life.

My words for this lesson are:

1. Hostler
2. Ebullience
3. Coltish
4. Tourmaline
5. Grue
6. Ostensibly
7. Primogeniture
8. Sibilant
9. Tester
10. Oubliette
11. Penury
12. Invective
13. Quiescent
14. Crenellation
15. Crocket
16. Aplomb
17. Privation
18. Transfigure
19. Poesy
20. Indelible
21. Inure

Progress

I finished writing Lunch Notes! I debated just quitting after four weeks, but I still had things to teach, so I found ways to do it more concisely...mostly using other peoples' resources. I am very glad to have that off my plate and will probably not write specifically for Christmas presents ever again.

Now that I'm done with Lunch Notes, I have refocused on writing blog stuff. I didn't get many posts written over the holidays so last week I ran out of blog buffer posts. This week I've written two review posts and this post. Before our next Writing Roundup post, I plan to have at least 4-5 posts in my buffer and start working on blog pages again. I really need to get them done; this endless procrastination is ridiculous.

I've also spent several hours this week brainstorming for character quirks, plots for future books, and random stuff like that. My brain is slowly but surely getting back into my story world. Watching anime with similar settings has been helpful.

In the last four weeks I've been writing on specific days I've set aside, so I've only gotten stars on my writing habit chart for eleven of the last 28 days. While it helps to get me into a focused mode, I would like to get back into the habit of writing every day, especially after I get caught up on blog stuff and back into novel-writing. Little and often just seems to work better for fiction because it keeps my brain immersed in the story world so that I'm thinking about it even when I'm not writing, which makes my actual writing time more productive.


That’s it! Writing Roundup #11 will come out in three weeks. To find other posts in this series and a more detailed explanation of the categories, visit An Eclectic Writing Class.